Pension strikes: You might as well protest against rain

We are all going to get poorer and poorer for the rest of our lives. This is because this country long ago chose to live beyond its means, and the blazing red Final Demands are now cascading on to the national doormat.

What is it, exactly, that we do to justify our comfortable way of life? Is it our world-beating export industries, supported by wise energy policies and a modern transport system? Or our superbly educated population, whose knowledge and skills are sought worldwide? Or our renowned work ethic?

No, that’s somewhere else. We are living on a reputation we long ago ceased to deserve. All our luxuries are bought on tick.

Petulant: The public sector strikers who protested on Wednesday were daft - as well as wrong

But our creditors have run out of patience, and we cannot pay them, so the bailiffs won’t be long. They will take the shape of severe inflation, already getting under way.

My guess is that most of the pensions we are now squabbling about will be worth little more than a box of matches by the time they are paid.

That is why last Wednesday’s petulant, self-righteous strikes were daft as well as wrong.

Anyone with ears to hear has known since the great balance of payments crisis of the Sixties that we were in bad trouble (we solved that problem by ceasing to care about it. It’s worse by far now than it was then).

But, led by empty and self-seeking politicians from all three parties, we have hidden the truth from ourselves.

Unlimited credit? Yours for the asking. Government borrowing? If we hide it in off-the-books fiddles, who’ll notice? Launching stupid invasions of other people’s countries? Count us in. We’ll pay somehow.

Like all swindles, the fruits of this have been rotten ones. Oceans of money were poured into the NHS, and it still can’t keep its wards clean or look after its patients properly.

And then there are all those Lego
schools and ‘universities’, churning out mountain-ranges of certificates
and diplomas which are for the most part direct tickets to the dole
queue.

And in the middle of
this there are actually people who are ready to go on strike because
their pensions aren’t going to be as good as they thought? You might as
well hold a strike against the annoying fact that it’s colder and
wetter in winter than in summer; or against the fact that the pound in
your pocket is worth less with every minute that passes.

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The real question is how much longer we can afford to employ so many people who don’t actually make anything that anyone wants to buy.

Knowing in their hearts that they were striking against their fellow countrymen, who will have to fork out if they win, the public-sector militants claimed that they were shutting down the schools, hospitals, crematoria, swimming pools and the rest because of a deep, unselfish desire to make these services better. Oh, please. And they talked as if they were morally superior simply because they worked in schools and hospitals. Is that so? Funny, if they do it so selflessly, that they accept payment for it at all, let alone squabble about how much.

It strikes me that a milkman who rises before dawn to deliver reliably to his customers is just as moral as a teacher or a hospital cleaner.

So is everyone who gives a fair day’s work in return for a fair day’s pay, the forgotten side of the ancient bargain on which all riches depend.

A joint effort to lie about dope...

Sex ‘education’ for children was followed by more sex among the young. What do you think will follow drug propaganda for children?

Well, we shall soon find out. For now there’s a children’s picture book about dope, called It’s Just A Plant (so is tobacco, so are opium poppies, so is deadly nightshade).

It’s full of the usual hogwash about ‘medical cannabis’, and the usual propaganda against the drug laws. It’s obviously aimed at irresponsible parents who, like so many modish British liberal elite types, smoke dope at home and want to lie to their children that this unpredictably devastating poison is perfectly safe, ‘soft’ like a soft drink.

I say, let it go on sale, provided the author adds a scene in a mental hospital where one of the characters ends up irreparably insane because he believed the cannabis lobby’s selfish lies.

...as BBC backs a career in sleaze

Well paid: Gemma Massey

A gruesome little film on the BBC website profiles Gemma Massey, who calls herself a ‘porn star’. The horrible thing about this is that it looks like career advice. It treats her ‘job’ as if it were normal, like nursing, bus driving or accountancy.

With her curiously distended lips plastered in some sort of slime, Gemma, smilingly explains that she’s very well paid and that her plastic surgery costs are met. If she wants a new car or a new house ‘they’ will buy it for her. There’s even a discussion about sexual diseases. Apparently you are safer in ‘the industry’ than ‘if you go on a night out and pull somebody’.

As for her parents, they were shocked at first, but when she told them what she was paid, they said: ‘We get it now.’ Well, quite.

This is bad enough in itself, but why is the BBC using public money to display it on the web?

Yet again one of our TV stations is trying to make us sob over the death penalty imposed on a convicted killer in the U.S.

I wish an American TV channel would come over here and make a programme about one of the hundreds of people who have had to watch the murderers of their husbands, wives, sons or brothers being let off and let out. The BBC and Channel 4 never will.

Hague is dancing to the mullahs' tune

All of a sudden, the sad cargoes of coffins from Afghanistan are increasing again.

I had thought that the Government, ashamed of this pointless war, had told the Army to keep its men safe from danger until they could pull them out. Plainly I was wrong. These new deaths are even more intolerable, now that our defeat has already been announced.

But it is worse than that. We seem to be preparing ourselves for yet another war – this time in Iran.

Enough is enough: Michael and Susan Thornton look on as the coffin of their son, Private Matthew Thornton, is carried into church for his funeral service at Darton All Saints Church, Barnsley, this week

How crass. Iran’s nuclear programme is a game. Iranian technology would have difficulty in delivering a pizza, let alone an H-bomb. It is aimed at riling silly, ignorant warmongers in the West, like our Foreign Secretary, William Hague. I seem to remember Mr Hague once mocking people who threatened more than they could deliver with the telling Texan phrase ‘Big hat, no cattle’.

Big hat, no cattle: Foreign Secretary William Hague

Given that the Coalition has reduced our Armed Forces to little more than a couple of cabin cruisers, an old pushbike and a spotter plane, doesn’t he think this might now apply to him?

The mullahs who rule in Tehran are hugely unpopular with Iran’s young, enlightened and civilised people.

But if they can claim that they are standing up for their country against foreign interference, they can shore up their support. It’s a very old trick, but it still works.

Britain should be especially careful about poking its snout into Iran. Every educated Persian still knows about and resents MI6’s idiotic and short-sighted overthrow of the popular Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953. It was this greedy and lawless action that led in the end to the 1979 revolution which put the ayatollahs in power.

We should be very modest and cautious in our dealings with this proud and ancient people. And we have sent quite enough soldiers to their deaths in dubious interventions in the past ten years.